Archive for July, 2010

I forgot how much I love lyric sheets. It’s fucking absurd – the length of some of these things. The fact they thought people cared about what they had to say, these bands. Huh. I cared. I still care. I still read lyric sheets. And Boxed In’s lyrics and explanations of the lyrics (is that purely a hardcore punk thing?) stretch the whole length of a two sided LP sized sheet, Xeroxed, sloppy and wonderful. How great is that? How goddamn uncouth at this point in time when any expectation of even a 30 second long attention span is woefully misguided or arrogant or both.

“I have no answer/I have no gospel/ I’m as lost as you/adrift in the madness/bombarded from birth of what we must be sold/ the dream of a life branded til death/ powerless?”
(from “Edifice”)

When I “moved on” from punk when I was 19 or 20, journeying to the outer reaches of free jazz, the art-gardery and noise I felt cheated by the lack of lyric sheets in the albums. Thankfully a lot of free jazz still included liner notes; usually obnoxious, rarely informative, but sometimes entertaining, they were things that tried to explain your reaction to the music for you. I still read them. Sometimes over and over, depending on how entertaining they are: I reread them while eating lunch, while taking a break from work, while on the toilet, while listening to the actual music even. I remember doing that with Crass lps, with Anti-Schism records, blanking out on what it all meant, what I was supposed to infer. The artifact of the record is still hugely important to me, simply for these little pieces of paper, which always seemed to be a connecting point between the music and listener, a small cry – just read this you idiot, enemy, friend, confidant.

Boxed In are a good punk band. They gave a shit. It seems they still do as they all seem to be in different bands now (see below). I can trace some lineages of the players on a quick google. Many of them have been in previous bands I still listen to, the most memorable being Health Hazard, Suffer and Ebola (all of which are seriously worth hunting down after you get past how ridiculous their names look printed next to each other). I always admired the UK scene at around the turn of the century. There were so many potent, angry records being churned out from bands like the aforementioned Suffer, Sawn Off, Headache, Voorhees, Stalingrad, Shank, Doom, Scatha, Urko and others. Usually these bands seemed to be documented by the Flat Earth and Armed With Anger labels, of which I believe Flat Earth is still around (and highly worth checking out.) I got the Boxed In self titled album at Ear Wax Records a month ago in their sale bin for 4 bucks, which seems ridiculous, but then I think of all the shattering things I’ve procured in sale bins I realize it might be a furthering of their worth. It’s almost as though you can only judge a bands quality by how unacknowledged they are. Eh, yeah, bad logic, but it’s a start. And Boxed In needs a new legion of fans, or at least a few more nostalgic dick heads like me– so let’s risk it.

Boxed In play an unruly but tight hardcore punk: fast, thrashy, with school boy production and Eric Wood-like bass flourishes. They’re not power violence, or grind core, or crust; they’re just speedy, pissed off thrashing hardcore. It’s fitting this was co-released by the excellent Crime Scene and Lengua Armada records (Los Crudos, Charle Bronson). Frankly, I don’t know or care what sub-genre they fit into, but it sounds like hardcore punk should — authentically angry vocals, minute but compact production, and music played at breakneck speed like as though what they were doing was, well, important. I keep thinking of Los Crudos as I listen to them, although it’s hard to really compare anything to Los Crudos at this point as their influence is so convoluted and important. But that same sense of putting it all in, as though the whole thing is a commentary on the collective lives of these guys at that one moment when the engineer hit record is just like Los Crudos. The playing is just shy of completely unhinged and manic. A contemporary day equivalent is probably Sex Vid, another back to basics, barely in control punk band that exhibits a certain, nebulous quality of fucked up punk rock ferocity and psychotic rage. But they also had a great dirge to them, a thundering, painful lunge as heard in a song like “They Live again…”

“The powerful are laughing and why not?… huddled masses left to die/it’s not rocket science…” (“They Live again)

And like life, the lyrics are all over the place, from the misanthropic rant on the state of experience, youth and the game of conkers (“That old chestnut) to a bombing of a street market in Baghdad (“Too many dead”). Yeah, they’re political, but more in those moments when we all feel like giving up on this crushing oncoming rush of men with guns. And the lyric sheet is something you can sit back and read and appreciate, simply for the goddamn effort. Because you do give a damn. You care. You got the message.

And is this going be a revelation in your listening life? No, probably not, but it’s a small gem in a shit pile. Forgotten most definitely, as so many things are but shouldn’t be. Anyway, it’s worth more than a couple of of listens some dreary afternoon.

Or, like me, you can luck out and stumble upon their album in your local record store. But please do buy the artifact. They put a lot of work in it. It shows. It practically bleeds out the grooves. And the album also has some great screen printed artwork, that you can feel under the fingertips, another aspect that I miss.

I’m not sure if a glass of bourbon is the best way to relax after a run. But I’ll give it a shot. The simplicity of sitting on a chair… the company to slow burn and astringency of charred oak. The ice is melting delicately, and it’s muggy as hell outside right now. I haven’t been hearing as many roman candles and Black Cats as I had hoped this time of year. Madison is too fucking polite sometimes, locked up in a fixed gear land of hippie fuzz tone and good vibrations, mang. Where’s the cordite blooms, the rivers of frat boy blood, the roving bands of date rape thugs in Sponge Bob Square Pants costumes? Oh, yeah, they’re back home with ma and pa, drinking Bud lite, and reading the back of Clean and Clear bottles. And instead I’m listening to Loris’s “The Cat from Cat Hill,” another disc from the UK based Another Timbre records… and it’s polite too, but in a good way, like that ingratiating new friend that never out stays his welcome and never drinks all of your beer but still tells good jokes anyway… even if this friend at first sounds like carpenter ants eating through raw bone, pincers flashing in the dark. Loris has been a highlight for me lately, sitting uneasily amongst less subtle recordings by bands with pentagrams featured in their logos. Loris is made up of Patrick Farmer, Sarah Hughes and Daniel Jones on assorted electronic and acoustic instruments too lengthy to list in polite company, but here’s some anyway: zither, piano, natural objects, turntable, and tapes. I don’t know any of them but they seem like cool people (actually I have no idea), and they create some very interesting music. Sustained tones spring up after the initial thorax heave of the first track, and glitches trip up then disappear, while a ringing is heard then cut off unceremoniously. God, it reminds me of why I started to get into this electro acoustic junk in the first place – that sublime encounter of disparate elements, of sounds you can practically touch in the dark like walking through great walls of smoke or fog, seeing bats wheel drunkenly in the air so daringly close to your head. It’s warmer than most EAI, thoroughly book smart on the fundamentals of the genre it seems. . . it’s not as austere as Filament, not as noisy as Cremaster, not drearily emotive as Schnee, but I can sense an acknowledgment of all of those things here, if not directly than somehow subliminally. I love how the second track opens with those piano notes, completely unexpected after the electronic pinch of the first track. It lends a certain nostalgic thrust to thing, even as the locked grooves (Jones here?) appear behind the notes, and that moment becomes fleeting, and sinks away to an extended tone, only for the piano to reassert itself once again, this time more abstracted, and less full of gravitas. Lovely really. I can’t think of a better word for it, achingly lovely. There’s this great juxtaposition of sounds here that the best of this music has, the sliding up of common but hard to place sounds next to one another, clicks and burrs, low volume field recordings of trains, or engine rattle or sizzling eggs (who the fuck knows). Nothing is overt and thus it doesn’t make you play the guess what sound that is game – what the hell was that? A mumbled half curse? A masticating answering machine? A feed backing tickle me Elmo? Nah, don’t bother, it’s for the birds. At this point the language of this style has been established, and the shock of sine tones, noisy rumbles and the assorted electronic dark alley dealings has worn off (for me at least, can’t speak for anyone else, I guess). And what’s left here is simply the music, how these sounds stand up as part of a composition (instant or not)… the obscure has become the recognized pallet, and you have to be able to actually use those colors well, blend and shade and create a picture whether it be Rothko or Rembrandt or . The acoustic instruments used here by Sarah Hughes are a boon, as they lend a solid grip to the music, a balancing weight that without it it might simply disappear into the 21st century art-fuck music (thanks Kennan) – music created as intellectual process rather than tired ol’ feelings. And I like feelings. If I want truth and commentary on audience expectation I’ll search youtube for Nick Nolte off his shit.

The more I listen to this the more I enjoy it, which speaks volumes for Loris. And it’s not all fun and games easy listening EAI as I’ve heard the work of those Swiss guys referred to. This stuff still annoys my girl friend, and would probably riddle most of my friends with anxiety (although many of them dig AMM). But we have enough Jerry Garcia’s. Enough Wolf Parades. And Loris should be as popular, or at least as well known, because as it stands, they do what they do so well, so picturesque in a sense. No, it’s not at this point where the art makes you shudder in awe or reconfirm your own proclivities, but it could approach those areas in the future. At this point, it defies expectations, defies boring mastubatory capital A art, and becomes something actually, well, moving and purposeful to listen to, something great to drink bourbon to as the night creeps in and my cat stares at me from afar, which is quaint, considering the title. Anyway, stop spending money on lattes and buy this: